Memories of Suburbia: Autobiographical Fiction and Minority Narratives

Abstract

Historians have recently begun to engage with fiction as a compelling and elucidative historical source. Novels deemed to engender autobiographical qualities have garnered particular attention for their presumed historical ‘authenticity’, yet memory work encoded within their narratives has rarely been considered. This chapter explores how memory functions within and through the conceptualisation of place within The Buddha of Suburbia (1990); White Teeth (2000) and Disobedience (2006). Bound up in apparently familiar images of London’s peripheries are individual remembrances of the past which intersect with and problematise collective memories of suburbia, and complicate the relationship between history, memory, fiction and identity.